You are right about the band members not interested in harvesting the rice. The DNR lowered the lake level on a lake nearby so the band members could harvest the rice. I have yet to see any band members ever out there. My neighbor is not happy about the DNR lowering the lake level on that particular lake because when the water level was high they used to troll for northerns with daredevils on cane poles. Now, it's too shallow to navigate with a small boat and motor.

Plenty of the natives up here harvest it.

Lufkin, most of the people I know who harvest it takes it to a processor to get their rice cleaned

I find this pretty fascinating.

One of my favorite meals after a long day of ice fishing is to pan fry some fillets, take some precooked wild rice toss it in a skillet with some pollo seasoning and saute it for a couple minutes.

I can 100% see that. Envious.

It’s not really that hard to do unless your doing hundreds of pounds at a time,

1 first it’s spread out on a sheet or tarp and allowed to dry

2 after it’s dry it time to remove the husks many at this point parch it by heating it on a flat piece of metal or in a pan stirring it so it doesn’t scorch to further dry it and kill any remaining rice worms, then it’s spread out again and worked to loosen the husks, originally natives did this by dancing on it which you can do or take a flail and beat it

3 Winnowing it comes next, we used to first take it and toss it into the air using hands, shovels or grain scoops ect, we would pick a nice windy day to do this, takes some time but you can usually get most of the husks off but there is always some that have to be removed by hand, we would wear leather gloves and rub it between our hands for this

If your only doing 10 or 20 pounds for your own use it’s not really all that hard no more then canning garden produce but doing large amounts then taking it to a processor is worth it

As a kid we would do around a hundred or so pounds for our own use which we do by hand the rest we would sell